Saturday, September 9

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New York City Ballet recovers from the pandemic and company scandal.

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At a daylong retreat inside the David H. Koch Theater, the company’s longtime home, City Ballet’s board, staff and artistic leaders began to map out a strategy.

They would keep a heavy focus on George Balanchine, the company’s co-founder [sic], while commissioning more works by living choreographers; they would redouble efforts to recruit Black, Latino and Asian artists and overhaul the company’s work culture; and they would continue to work to attract younger audiences in part by collaborating with pop-culture figures and investing in digital marketing.

 

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Pacific Northwest Ballet will perform in Spokane for the first time.

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Pacific Northwest Ballet will perform several pieces, including Kent Stowell’s White and Black Swan Pas de Deux from “Swan Lake,” Jessica Lang’s “The Calling,” Jiří Kylián’s “Petite Mort” and Twyla Tharp’s “Sweet Fields.”

 

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Tulsa Ballet closes out the Jacob's Pillow season....

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The company’s performances routines drew standing ovations from the crowds, even when rain storms in the Berkshire Mountains forced the show to relocate from the festival’s main outdoor theater to smaller indoor venues.

...and opens its new season.

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Saunders is one of the choreographers whose work will be featured in Tulsa Ballet’s season opening production, “Creations in Studio K,” the annual showcase of new dance pieces created specifically for the company.

 

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Barbara Walczak, Ruth Lawrence Doering (Ruth Gilbert), and Myrna Galle share memories of New York City Ballet and the company's opening at City Center in 1948.

 

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BALANCHINE HAD WORK TO DO. “He broke us,” Walczak said, describing how Balanchine remade his dancers from scratch, starting with the tendu, in which the leg extends to the front, side or back. “He took us with our imperfect bodies,” she said. “We would be standing with our back to the barre in fifth position,” she added, brushing their feet in each direction, sometimes facing the barre with their arms crossed. They moved slowly, painstakingly so.

”His whole class was like that,” she said. “There wasn’t a single dance step in the entire class. We never went across the floor!”

 

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A look at how Balanchine's ballets have fared since his death by Brian Seibert in The New York Times.

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And now a new phase is coming. As Russell put it, speaking of her generation, “We’re all too old to preserve that tradition in the same way.”

Lopez, who is 20 years younger, made a similar point. “There aren’t many of us,” she said, “who worked with him and still talk about him as if he were next door.” But she also spoke about dancers, at Miami City Ballet and elsewhere, hungry to learn Balanchine’s aesthetic, dancers born after he died who talk about him as if they knew him.

 

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The 92d Street Y presents Alexei Ratmansky in conversation with Marina Harss and Sara Mearns.

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Ratmansky, “the most sought-after man in ballet” (The New Yorker ), has revitalized the art of ballet with a bold, sprawling body of work suffused with vivid emotion and his unique, and always surprising, approach to storytelling. Harss’s new biography is an audacious act of storytelling in its own right. After following the ascent of Ratmansky’s career for nearly two decades, she tells the story of an artist of mixed Ukrainian and Russian descent honing his craft, discovering his voice, and using his platform on the global stage to become the most vocal critic of Vladimir Putin in the quintessentially Russian ballet world.